Dylan McKerchie — stratocaster

How To Keep a Bigsby in tune... A tremolo/Vibrato system is one of those things that many people tend to love, hate, or put up with. Are you one of those people that bought a guitar with a tremolo system and very quickly locked it down because it wouldn't stay in tune? The Bigsby Specifically... The principles in this article apply to all tremolo/Vibrato systems, but the Bigsby seems to get a bad rap a lot more than a Strat style or Floyd style Vibrato. This is probably because once you put a Bigsby on your guitar, you are committed....

String Tension... What affects what? Bonus Footage on the Video!!!!! Les Paul Top wrapping... Yes, No? String tension is something we might take for granted once we have been playing for a while. The string of a particular mass being stretched tightly to a given tension over a calculated distance is what gives us our note. You can see the math to the right.  In real terms, The longer the scale of the guitar, the tighter the string needs to be pulled to get a given note if all other factors are the same. A 25.5" scale requires a higher...

Tone Caps... Highly Debated yet Very Simple Some people don't use their tone knob at all... Others constantly are fiddling with it. How does it work? First off, the tone circuit in a passive system is a filter. It can only cut frequencies from what is available from the pickups. Anytime we speak of "boosting lows" for instance in a passive system, we are cutting other frequencies to accentuate the lows. The tone circuit in your guitar usually consists of a pot that is used as a variable resistor that sends the signal through a cap (filter) to ground. The...

One of the hottest topics on the internet is 250k vs 500k pots and why we choose what we choose..... The answer seems simple... But WHY? The common answer to this debate seems easy. 250k pots for single coils and 500k for humbuckers. Let's get into why these have become the most common choices. Basic Rules of Electronics 1. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance to ground... ALWAYS. 2. Anytime there is a path to ground for your guitar signal, high frequencies are the first to go. The simple guitar circuit would consist of the pickup, two wires...

What does Scatter wound actually mean? The term "scatter wound" is one of those buzzwords we hear all the time. I have clients ask me regularly "How Scatter wound are your pickups?" So what does this even mean? As we saw from our blog post on handwound pickups, the tension, traverse, and speed (at least at our shop) are all controlled by hand. This differs from a machine wound pickup where all of these variables are automatic. For this discussion we are mostly concerned with traverse. This refers to how many winds per layer are put on the coil and...